Introduction

The reputation of British art school is indelibly linked to the early 1990s rise of the Young British Artists and the ‘Cool Britannia’ slogan popularised by Saatchi and adopted briefly by the New Labour government. Known for provocation, hedonism and sexuality, with raucous partying and hard drinking, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and to a lesser extent the artistic and social behaviour of Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk and the Chapman Brothers, pushed boundaries in the art scene and society writ large. Most associated with Goldsmiths arts college, the YBAs, as they were latterly termed, were trained in a narrow pool of chiefly London-based art schools including Chelsea, the Slade, the Royal College of Arts and Glasgow (While 2003; Grenfell and Hardy 2003). Already attracting attention from international art markets, the defining art exhibition Sensation cemented their subversive reputation. Touring to Berlin, Sydney and Tokyo, Sensation was cancelled in New York due to threats of financial sanctions by Rudy Giuliani, then mayor – only adding to their notoriety (Grenfell and Hardy 2003: 20). Mapping the wild success of the YBAs, Grenfell and Hardy (2003: 30) identified the close networks of institutions and stakeholders involved. Mostly based in London, and distinguished by youthfulness and shared nationality, the YBAs presented as narrowly white, with the exception of Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare. Following on from the racial and aesthetic politics of the BLK Art Group, a collective of young black artists formed in Wolverhampton, and British counterpoint to the wider Black Power Movement, the dominant ‘white space’ of the YBAs movement attracted derision (http:// www.blkartgroup.info/index.html). Writing in Third Text, Kobena Mercer (1999) is scathing of an attitude and symbolic language that communicated a ‘don't care localism’ playing on outmoded stereotypes of Britishness and a ‘withdrawing and retreating from difference into an identity politics of its own’ (Mercer 1990: 55). For Mercer, the YBAs were less characterised by innovation and edginess, and more by retrogressiveness, at least politically, representing ‘come back to what you know’ (55).

In this chapter I outline a history of the British art school and its links to colonialism in order to contextualise discourse and debate around a politics of difference for Muslim women art students and emerging artists.